Photos that you think you're deleting from Facebook are still remaining on …

Facebook is still working on deleting photos from its servers in a timely manner nearly three years after Ars first brought attention to the topic. The company admitted on Friday that its older systems for storing uploaded content "did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," but said it's currently finishing up a newer system that makes the process much quicker. In the meantime, photos that users thought they "deleted" from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.

The problem: "deleted" photos never go away

When we first investigated this phenomenon in 2009, we discovered that photos "deleted" from Facebook seemingly never go away if you have a direct link to the image file on Facebook's servers. Users who might have had second thoughts about posting a photo—whether it was because they didn't want retaliation from an employer, wanted to avoid family drama, or uploaded a photo of a friend without their permission—could certainly remove the image from Facebook's main user interface, but as long as someone had a direct link to the .jpg file in question, the photo would remain accessible for an indefinite amount of time. When we asked Facebook about it, we were told that the company was "working with our content delivery network (CDN) partner to significantly reduce the amount of time that backup copies persist."

But when we followed up on the story more than a year later, our "deleted" photos were still accessible via direct link. That's when the reader stories started pouring in: we were told horror stories about online harassment using photos that were allegedly deleted years ago, and users who were asked to take down photos of friends that they had put online.

There were plenty of stories in between as well, and panicked Facebook users continue to e-mail me, asking if we have heard of any new way to ensure that their deleted photos are, well, deleted. For example, one reader linked me to a photo that a friend of his had posted of his toddler crawling naked on the lawn. He asked his friend to take it down for obvious reasons, and so the friend did—in May of 2008. As of this writing in 2012, I have personally confirmed that the photo is still online, as are several others that readers linked me to that were deleted at various points in 2009 and 2010.

(Amusingly, after publishing the 2010 followup, Facebook appeared to delete my photos from its CDN that I had linked in the piece. The company never offered me any explanation, but my photos were the only ones that were deleted at that time. Other "deleted" photos that I had saved links to—ones that weren't from my account and were deleted even earlier than mine—remained online.)

It's 2012, and things aren't much different—yet

After confirming once again that all the photos that my friends and Ars readers had sent in were still online, I reached out to Facebook once again, looking for an answer as to why this is still going on nearly three years after the company first promised it was "working" on the issue.

"The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens told Ars via e-mail.

Wolens explained that photos remaining online are stuck in a legacy system that was apparently never operating properly, but said the company is working on a new system that will delete the photos in a mere month and a half. For really real this time.

"We have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted within 45 days of the removal request being received," Wolens said. "This process is nearly complete and there is only a very small percentage of user photos still on the old system awaiting migration, the URL you provided was stored on this legacy system. We expect this process to be completed within the next month or two, at which point we will verify the migration is complete and we will disable all the old content."

Long story short, Wolens claims that Facebook is on the verge of fixing up its content systems so that "deleted" photos are really, truly deleted from the CDN within 45 days. But with the process not expected to be finished until a couple months from now—and unfortunately, with a company history of stretching the truth when asked about this topic—we'll have to see it before we believe it.

It's hard to believe that we've been following this story over a period of years and the problem hasn't been fixed yet. But unlike the past, we do have some semblance of confidence that Facebook might actually be working on it this time. We'll continue to follow this story until the new changes are actually in place. In the meantime, does anyone have any new Facebook horror stories to share?

Would filing DMCA takedown notices be an effective way to get things done?

Nope - included in the fine print on Facebook's TOS is that you waive certain rights in perpetuity to your content. Makes things easy on their legal department, bad for you if you're cleaning up your online identity when going into witness protection...

IIRC (and I may not) Facebook doesn't store photos as files. The quote I vaguely remember reading is that filesystems are not very good at storing rather enormous numbers of files. Instead, because photos are readonly, Facebook stores photos in enormous files, and your photo is just part of that file. Obviously there's an index somewhere which maps photo X to offset Y in jpg blob Z.

That was from some article or other I read on the interwebs ages (and no, I'm not going to bother doing the google searc for you), so take it with the usual shaker of salt.

So maybe that's part of the issue. Or not.

Also, in the article, I didn't understand who's baby it was: the photographer's or the friend's. Too many "his" for me to parse the sentence.

I'm at a loss to understand why it would take even 45 days to delete something that is stored electronically. Is their server farm on pluto or something?

I'm guessing tiered backups.

I am guessing (actually, more than guessing -- big data is what I do) shitty infrastructure. Delete queues and cache invalidation are not that hard to deal with.Anyways, EU regulations happen to not care why, just care how. I for one count on Neelie Kroes to take a hard, deep look at it, and make FB shit their diaper and eventually fix it like they did M$.

when they converted my account to timeline - without my asking - nor my desire to, they decided that all the photos I posted were PUBLIC.

WTF. I don't post anything to the public ever. Massive screwup on Facebook's part. Their photo system is completely hosed. and the timeline transition sucked.

what I hate most about facebook is there is no where to bitch when they f-up. So they are just not listening, this is the future of network computing? that's a pretty crappy future.

when is dispora, or google plus or anything please God, bless a company with anything that has a simply multi-blogging interface so folks can share their posts, pictures easily. Its the only thing anyone uses on fB anyway. The rest of the fluff was never requested and never wanted and just gets in the way.

Fix the basics. respect privacy and start paying for violating the expectations of the users of this advertising company's free-ware based multi-threaded blog. I remember some Java code floating around yonks ago that did a better job than fb. Why doesn't disney or who ever took over Web Broadcasting System just resurrect it.. It had groups, a real-time timeline, stuff fB is just implementing. Of course, fB's founder was in diapers back then, so reinventing the wheel makes sense to he and his group.

sheez. how sick of a service do we need to get before a simple multi-threaded blogger with some groups is developed. Every week its some other crap ware change no one wants. Its entirely unbelievable a 500 billion dollar company like google can't find two guys in their Mom's basement that can whack out over 3 months, a useable, privacy respecting replacement -sans all the advertising deals for 'likes' everywhere that only make sense to advertisers.

Its not an OS like Windows, it isn't useful in any business other than the advertising market, it isn't a productivity tool, it takes away, not adds value to the productivity of the work force.

Its no wonder MSFT and Apple don't want to build one, its a massive time hole for people, and does zip for actually making anything, other than more fluff.

and we can't even get our picture deleted. or set to the proper privacy setting. aaaaaarrrrgggggg.

by ignoring the public, the ivory tower is now leaning hard over. over centralization isn't a good thing.

I googled "Facebook FAT32 prototype" and "Facebook FAT prototype" and came back with nothing. Curious to know whether your comment has any basis (and let me be the first to say my source for today has been hazy memory). The issues weren't technical (as I recall) so much as massively underestimating how popular photos would be.

I don't use FB and never have, but this makes me wonder how they could have had such an important issue and never be taken to court about it. I know things are different in the US, but in the EU, several countries have laws requiring companies to take down data related to a person in “a timely fashion” if that person requires it.

I permanently deleted my Facebook profile (entire account, using their account deletion form) 2 years ago and then about 3 weeks ago I got an email for a friend request, and then found out my account at some point was re-enabled - with ALL the old content still there.

I hate Facebook... I have nothing up there, but the fact that I have been unable to successfully delete my account for 2 years just sucks... How can this company get away with blatant violations in their own privacy policies, etc... without any investigation? when Google changes a policy to make it easier to understand and they get crucified...

I really hope Facebook going public will help put them in place, they need a lot more scrutiny.

I call BS - it barely takes a millisecond to queue a file for deletion. Even if they're delaying deletion to avoid excessive performance impact, it's a task that can be done once a day with a simple cron job.

Bottom line is that Facebook are not a trustworthy company - why are they being so evasive about this issue? If there is a technical reason why it takes so long to delete a photo, we'd be interested to hear it.

They're being evasive about it because, at the end of the day, Facebook has only one way to make money -- selling your info to marketers. That's the reason they're poised for the biggest IPO in history, even at the bottom of a recession. But you can't sell information that you allow to be deleted.

Faceschnook has been a privacy nightmare from the git-go. This will only intensify now that they are becoming a public company. They may get a billion members by the end of this year, but they will need to data-mine all the more intensively in order to keep Wall Street happy with OMG profit levels. It will be increasingly tough as more and more people realize the whole thing is about personal data raping, and abandon ship. Plus, my guess is half of those billion members are businesses, companies and huge corporations. The whole thing is one mindless clusterf*ck of promotion and user tracking. This is what we call enterprise in America today.

It may take so long to delete the photos because its an expensive operation. Things are not so simple....Give the engineers at Facebook some credit.

Rubbish. Deleting a file is a much cheaper operation than actually saving the file, which occurs instantly. To delete a file, all that needs to be done is to set a flag in the file system. Actually saving the file, however, involves writing a number of bytes to disk, and that's not even considering any optimization that needs to happen.

No one is asking that the file be forensically purged from disk (though that would be nice) -- just simply deleted and made inaccessible from the web server. The fact that the files are not even been flagged as deleted in the file system is inexcusable despite your best apologetic efforts.

It may take so long to delete the photos because its an expensive operation. Things are not so simple....Give the engineers at Facebook some credit.

Rubbish. Deleting a file is a much cheaper operation than actually saving the file, which occurs instantly. To delete a file, all that needs to be done is to set a flag in the file system. Actually saving the file, however, involves writing a number of bytes to disk, and that's not even considering any optimization that needs to happen.

No one is asking that the file be forensically purged from disk (though that would be nice) -- just simply deleted and made inaccessible from the web server. The fact that the files are not even been flagged as deleted in the file system is inexcusable despite your best apologetic efforts.

I think the issue may be that facebook has absolutely no idea what files are actually deleted. It may be only recently that they actually started tracking deletions, and thus never accounted for them before except removing the links from the profiles... Who knows what their back-end databases look like... But they need to modify their privacy policy to tell users that their files are actually never deleted or DELETE them...

The 45 day response is very likely centered around legal issues. Any given image, post, status update or chat log may be part of a legal proceeding with or without the knowledge of the user. Delaying a delete from the system is probably simply to ensure that the deletes pass through a legal filter and have time to be flagged as not for deletion because of a legal hold.

The company I work for has this for their Exchange email. I'd imagine that Facebook deals with many cases from insurance fraud to worker comp claims to drug usage as a major source of evidence. Now, that said, I would think that there's ways to hold images for evidence without leaving them publicly accessible, but the 45 day deletion policy is easily explainable.

The 45 day response is very likely centered around legal issues. Any given image, post, status update or chat log may be part of a legal proceeding with or without the knowledge of the user. Delaying a delete from the system is probably simply to ensure that the deletes pass through a legal filter and have time to be flagged as not for deletion because of a legal hold.

The company I work for has this for their Exchange email. I'd imagine that Facebook deals with many cases from insurance fraud to worker comp claims to drug usage as a major source of evidence. Now, that said, I would think that there's ways to hold images for evidence without leaving them publicly accessible, but the 45 day deletion policy is easily explainable.

45 days is fine - 3 years is not... if there policy says 45 days then they need to follow it.

I think the issue may be that facebook has absolutely no idea what files are actually deleted. It may be only recently that they actually started tracking deletions, and thus never accounted for them before except removing the links from the profiles... Who knows what their back-end databases look like... But they need to modify their privacy policy to tell users that their files are actually never deleted or DELETE them...

In which case, the issue then becomes that Facebook engineers were incompetent when building this feature of the site. If they're removing files from the site and not storing the file system identifier for the file in some kind of "delete_these_files" table, then they're incompetent, which is certainly not out of the question. My point was that nothing about this should be expensive.

My guess is that the juveniles that Facebook hire think it's fun to pass around these deleted photos to each other. After all, it's nice and easy to see the racy photos when they have a 'deleted' tag on them.

This story is absolutely asinine. If someone went through the trouble of saving a direct link to a photo before it's removed, then they could just save the damn photo and do whatever they want with it. Facebook's deletion policies are the least of your worries here.

This story is absolutely asinine. If someone went through the trouble of saving a direct link to a photo before it's removed, then they could just save the damn photo and do whatever they want with it. Facebook's deletion policies are the least of your worries here.

If Facebook has a policy they need to follow it. Based on their current policies and "procedures" they are not following them. If you deleted a file, you removed the rights for facebook to host the file. After 3 years the files is still hosted - then obviously they are not following their own rules...

This story is absolutely asinine. If someone went through the trouble of saving a direct link to a photo before it's removed, then they could just save the damn photo and do whatever they want with it. Facebook's deletion policies are the least of your worries here.

If Facebook has a policy they need to follow it. Based on their current policies and "procedures" they are not following them. If you deleted a file, you removed the rights for facebook to host the file. After 3 years the files is still hosted - then obviously they are not following their own rules...

So sue them. See where it goes. Again, this is a non-issue because the privacy worries overlook the fact that anyone can share what you post regardless of if Facebook respects its deletion policy or not. There's no deleting publicly accessible material from the internet.